When Tony Gibson talks about what Danica Patrick needs to do to improve in 2014, her crew chief doesn’t talk about an improved focus or her spending more time at the racetrack.

While Patrick appears to have a busy off-track schedule hosting awards shows, doing commercial shoots and just managing the world of being Danica, Gibson says her commitment to racing is strong. Now it’s just a matter of her team working with her to find the feel in the car she needs to go fast by the time the race starts.

Patrick opened her 2013 season in glamorous fashion by winning the pole for the Daytona 500 — the first woman ever to win a pole for a Cup race. But after her historic eighth-place finish in the Daytona 500, she had a less-than-impressive rookie season as she finished 27th in the Cup standings and second to boyfriend Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in the race for rookie of the year.

“I am sure everybody wondered and I wondered is this really what she wants to do? Is all the hype, is it just for promotional stuff or does this girl really want to drive a racecar?” Gibson said in a recent phone interview.

“After being with her for a year, I’m 100 percent convinced and sold that this is really what she wants to do. She loves to do it. She loves to go and test. She loves to drive a racecar. Her will to get better has blown me away.”

Gibson, who has worked in the Cup garage for more than 20 years, said he has seen that passion on race weekends when Patrick gets frustrated and emotional over poor performances.

“The biggest thing is how hard she is on herself,” Gibson said. “She is so hard on herself when she doesn’t qualifying good or when things don’t go right.

“Even when we make mistakes, she’s intense, she’s passionate about it. … If somebody was just in it for the money, they’re not really going to (care). As hard as she is on herself, this proves to me that this is what she wants to do, she wants to get better, she doesn’t want to let anybody down, including herself.”

Gibson said Patrick's biggest problem last year was that the team would throw too much at the car, which had to have maximum flexibility built into it because the Stewart-Haas Racing team didn’t know how Patrick would feel in the car. It was only Patrick's second full season in NASCAR and the former IndyCar driver just started driving stock cars in the Nationwide Series 2010.

“We would just sling things, just trying to search for something that would help because her experience was really, really raw, so a lot of things we would have to throw at it and hope it (stuck),” Gibson said. “Not having the experience in a stock car, her knowledge on that side of it was limited.

“Until she started building that notebook on things that really helped her in making changes, it was really difficult. She really couldn’t help us get to the point where we needed to be, so we would just have to lean on the other guys or shoot from the hip and hoped it worked.”

As the season progressed, Patrick learned to correlate shock, spring and track bar changes to the data she was seeing about how the car handled. Eventually, it allowed the team to work more methodically because they knew what changes would help her more.

“At the start of these races, we were just really, really slow and really bad but as we went along and everybody settled in and she got more comfortable, we got better and better throughout the race,” Gibson said. “We would get better but we would lose so much at the start of the run.

“That’s one of the things that we’ve made plans to work on this year is to do better at the start of a run, to really dig after it, get aggressive.”

With new qualifying procedures expected to include group qualifying that will allow for multiple laps on the track (and possibly knockout rounds), Patrick could qualify better as she struggled going out and running one fast lap in her only chance to record a qualifying time.

“It will definitely benefit her as far as getting multiple laps in,” Gibson said. “I think that is a plus for us for sure. The only disadvantage is it sounds like you’re going to be around other cars on the track. Some of that might affect the aero or other things.

“At the end of the day, her making multiple laps is going to benefit us.”

Gibson’s crew has remained the same and is a group that has been together for about a dozen years. The team has been pretty much insulated from the expansion at SHR, which is expanding from three to four teams.

The other three teams each have new crew chiefs — Chad Johnston has taken over Tony Stewart's No. 14 team, Daniel Knost is with the crew (Ryan Newman's old team) that will work with new driver Kurt Busch, and Rodney Childers has built a whole new team and crew for Kevin Harvick.

Gibson hopes he can build on the momentum from last year's season finale at Homestead, where Patrick qualified 24th and finished 20th. Patrick had just nine top-20 finishes all season.

“I think that shows we are getting better and she can do this, she can run with those guys,” Gibson said. “We’ve got to be a more consistent top-20 car this year. That’s our goal. We’re not running from 25th to 35th anymore.

“A bad day for us needs to be 25th, not 35th. We need to be a solid top-20 car, which we’ve proven we can do on multiple occasions.”